By Alex L. Goldfayn

October 25, 2006

President Bush did an interview on CNBC with Maria Bartiromo this week.

She asked him if he had ever Googled anyone.

According to CNBC's transcript of the interview, this is what he said:

Occasionally. One of the things I’ve used on the Google is to pull up
maps. It’s very interesting to see that. I forgot the name of the
program, but you get the satellite and you can — like, I kind of like
to look at the ranch on Google, reminds me of where I want to be
sometimes. Yeah, I do it some.

The name of the program, of course, is Google Maps. Or, if he was looking at satellite images, he was using Google Earth.

Question: Doesn't being President come with access to the government's own satellite technology which (I'm just guessing here) is a bit better than Google's?

Later in the interview, our president had this to say. Please, follow along:

“I tend not to email or — not only tend not to email, I don’t email,
because of the different record requests that can happen to a
president. I don’t want to receive emails because, you know, there’s no
telling what somebody’s email may — it would show up as, you know, a
part of some kind of a story, and I wouldn’t be able to say, `Well, I
didn’t read the email.’ `But I sent it to your address, how can you say
you didn’t?’ So, in other words, I’m very cautious about emailing.”

Isn't there some kind of super-secure, classified White House e-mail that his I.T. folks could implement?

Imagine the conversation if President Bush had to make a technical support call. Perhaps he would get a technician in India. The kind who repeats everything you say back to you before responding (this makes the conversation needlessly long and always frustrating). That would be a fun chat to listen in on.

Firefox 2 does. Internet Explorer 7 does not. There's no Mac version available of IE7. So we Mac users are "limited" to the highly-secure Safari browser, made by Apple, or the highly secure Firefox browser. For what it's worth, I use Firefox.

What Should You Do?

Windows users should download both IE7 and Firefox 2. They're not mutually exclusive, and there's no reason to limit yourself to just one. Still, I suspect you'll find yourself using Firefox more than Explorer.

Mac users should not think twice about downloading Firefox 2. I think it's quite a lot better than Safari.

The best part about these "browser wars" is that all parties involved are free.